Jeannie
4 books read for LibriVox
- You'll wince through this one in the best way: Alice picking her own violets and inventing a glamorous life for a boy she likes, while her family quietly falls apart around her. It's sad and small-town specific, and that awful hot dinner party scene stays with you.
- Slower and stranger than Jane Eyre, this one, but Shirley Keeldar herself is worth the wait: an heiress who runs her own estate and calls herself Captain Keeldar, half teasing, half serious. If you like Yorkshire moors, mill riots, and quiet, prickly friendships between women, settle in.
- The Education of Henry Adams non-fictionYou get a sly, self-questioning education in how a brilliant man misunderstands his own life, told in the oddly distancing third person. Adams moves from Civil War Washington to the Virgin of Chartres and the Dynamo of 1900, making this dense, funny, restless book rewarding if you like ideas with a human bruise underneath.
- What’s Wrong with the World non-fictionYou get Chesterton’s cheerful contrarian mind at full stretch here, arguing for small property, family life, and ordinary people against modern systems, with jokes arriving in the middle of serious arguments. It’s lively but polemical and often dated, especially on women, so you read it for the provocations rather than a ready-made political program.